well, one of the best (and non-mind-melting) parts of planning a wedding is, of course, the invites. i was really looking forward to this part, especially enlisting my super creative, super fun and super stylish friend, kate (and her stationery business, saturate design) to help me do something original, fun and budget-conscious!!
we started talking about 1) colors 2) good paper and 3) ducks.
on colors: i knew i wanted bright colors, and also to weave something korean-inspired into the plan. i guess i have some ongoing guilt/anxiety about not having there be anything really korean about our wedding--but it's really hard to do all that stuff (the bowing, towers of sweet rice cakes, music, etc.) without a koreatown nearby. if we were in LA or in nyc (near fort lee or queens), where there are many koreans and korean banquet halls, it would have been a piece of cake to get all the food, music and have someone coordinate all the rituals. but it's much harder here in sf.
i guess, also, i wasn't sure about doing the korean thing because the ceremony is so solemn. i think we wanted something, dare i say it, happier and more joyful. also i didn't want to wear a hanbok all day (they're so stiff and itchy), and thought sean would look pretty ridiculous in a jaeogori. also some of the rituals are totally arcane and paternalistic, and since neither sean nor i feel particularly bound to these traditions, we decided to scrap the idea.
but anyway, back to colors: though i always hated wearing hanboks, i love the colors and the graphic quality of the stripes, and wanted to bring in that palette somehow. so i asked kate to incorporate some of these colors, which i thought on paper could communicate a happy, festive feel:
on good paper: well this was totally kate's (great) idea: hand-printed invites on fancy paper. she sent me to a site where i could get the good italian stuff (thick, with a little texture and molded edges) for cheap. to boot, this fabriano paper comes in many sizes with matching envelopes, and in these great boxes that i will keep and repurpose for storing my precious letters, postcards, etc.:
finally, the ducks: well korean people have these wooden mallards all over their house. they seemed so ubiquitous and ordinary that it never even occurred to me that they might have any meaning or significance. well, i only recently discovered that they are often gifted to a bride and groom as a symbol of their commitment (ducks apparently mate for life??).
a fun fact discovered (by kate's mom) in this process: ducks are a pan-asian (not just korean) symbol of marriage and fertility! next step: kate infused the type with the bold colors, and incorporated the ducks as an accent. she did the typesetting, i did the color adjusting and printing on my trusty epson 1280 (an inkjet that has sat idle on my desk since grad school...):
i went to flax and chose sunny envelopes to match the ducks, and to give our guests that happy feeling of getting something special in the mail. then voilà, the whole package:
the next challenge: following up on that "invitation to follow" bit. yeah. hope to bring the ducks back in, but i may pull back on the colors a bit. we'll see, stay tuned!
